What are the elements of beautiful code?
1,404 karma · joined February 22, 2010
But I'm not sure that it really gives me any more confidence in my knowledge of the contractual agreement than if I hadn't read the TOS at all.
I think a company's TOS is based on the assumption that if the company tries to use their TOS to take advantage of lots of people, if one person finds out, everyone finds out. And the company has to answer.
If a company makes their TOS more readable, I'm still agreeing to the contract on the same assumption. It doesn't matter that I read it. What matters is that I legally bound myself to the TOS, not the summary.
What would be way cooler was if the TOS summary sections were curated by the masses (wikipedia style). See, that I would trust and I would be interested in reading.
By contrast, I left college last May with a large theoretical base in Finance and with no desire to pursue it practically.
In some sense, programs like Dev Bootcamp and traditional education start on the path of knowledge from opposite ends. In the middle lies experience (that mystical thing people say I will have one day).
Having started on each end of this path exactly once (on a large scale anyway), I don't know if they hold any gravity, but, in my experience, learning practically by "hacking out some web apps in Ruby on Rails" left me hungry to understand software engineering while learning theoretically about investment strategies and real estate markets left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
But on 3rd thought...
The people who care about what you've built and are going to evangelize it for you aren't your friends and family or the people who see you on an ad platform, it's the people who's problem you're solving. If you already know who they are, and if they think you're as valuable as you think you are, then add incentives to their sharing with their friends. that's why gamification is the new big thing these days...
if you haven't found your customers, and i mean real people with names, not just the demographic or psychographic that is in your business plan. If you've found 2-3 people, then get them to use your product. then get feedback so you can make their lives even easier. as part of that feedback, give them the option of inviting others into the circle.
you can also go the easy route and get in touch with a mashable or TC writer. Even a small blurb will get you a bunch of random signups, 80% of whom will unsubscribe from your list and forget about you 5 minutes after they sign up.